Telecom start-ups are worried that a possible ruling by the feds will return Ma Bell offspring Verizon Communications to its monopoly status.

Verizon has asked the Federal Communications Commission to drop a requirement that forces the telephone company to let new rivals rent the “last mile” of its copper wire infrastructure at a discount.

Many competitors in the six markets where Verizon is seeking the exemption – including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Providence, R.I., and Virginia Beach, Va. – say a ruling in the company’s favor could ruin their business because it could jack up the prices they pay.

Such a move, they argue, would result in fewer choices for consumers and ultimately lead to pricier phone bills.

“Verizon is seeking a massively anticompetitive rollback of one of the last few rules that allows competitors to offer choices to consumers,” said one telecom lobbyist.

“Duopoly competition” – with the incumbent telecom giants and cable companies dominating the phone market – “is clearly not enough to keep prices down and ensure consumers have a robust number of choices,” he added.

But Verizon counters that competition has heated up considerably since the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which forced AT&T and its Baby Bell descendants to offer new entrants cheap access to the multibillion dollar networks they’d built while operating as monopolies.

“Any suggestion that there’s some limit on competition in these markets just doesn’t recognize the reality that now [consumers can get phone service from] wireline, cable, Internet and wireless. And there are a variety of other ways of sending messages,” said Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe.

“People like to paint Verizon as some sort of monopoly, but that hasn’t been the case for more than 10 years.”

The FCC was set to rule on Verizon’s request in December.

Verizon filed the request with the FCC after fellow Baby Bell Qwest Communications won a similar ruling in Omaha.

The competitors who pay Verizon to use its last-mile infrastructure point to that case to illustrate how getting rid of the regulation would be bad news for competition and consumers.

Since that ruling took effect in March 2006, telecom provider McLeodUSA, which relies on parts of Qwest’s infrastructure, has said it might have to pull out of the market because it is too expensive to operate.